CHAPTER 28.
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Levi
Udraka gives a feast in Jesus’ honor. Jesus speaks on the unity of God and the brotherhood of life. Criticises the priesthood. Becomes the guest of a farmer.
Benares is the sacred city of the Brahms, and in Benares Jesus taught; Udraka was his host.
2 Udraka made a feast in honor of his guest, and many high born Hindu priests and scribes were there.
3 And Jesus said to them, With much delight I speak to you concerning life—the brotherhood of life.
4 The universal God is one, yet he is more than one; all things are God; all things are one.
5 By the sweet breaths of God all life is bound in one; so if you touch a fiber of a living thing you send a thrill from center to the outer bounds of life.
6 And when you crush beneath your foot the meanest worm, you shake the throne of God, and cause the sword of right to tremble in its sheath.
7 The bird sings out its song for men, and men vibrate in unison to help it sing.
8 The ant constructs her home, the bee its sheltering comb, the spider weaves her web, and flowers breathe to them a spirit in their sweet perfumes that gives them strength to toil.
9 Now, men and birds and beasts and creeping things are deities, made flesh; and how dare men kill anything?
10 ’Tis cruelty that makes the world awry. When men have learned that when they harm a living thing they harm themselves, they surely will not kill, nor cause a thing that God has made to suffer pain.
11 A lawyer said, I pray you, Jesus, tell who is this God you speak about; where are his priests, his temples and his shrines?
12 And Jesus said, The God I speak about is every where; he cannot be compassed with walls, nor hedged about with bounds of any kind.
13 All people worship God, the One; but all the people see him not alike.
14 This universal God is wisdom, will and love.
15 All men see not the Triune God. One sees him as the God of might; another as the God of thought; another as the God of love.
16 A man’s ideal is his God, and so, as man unfolds, his God unfolds. Man’s God today, tomorrow is not God.
17 The nations of the earth see God from different points of view, and so he does not seem the same to every one.
18 Man names the part of God he sees, and this to him is all of God; and every nation sees a part of God, and every nation has a name for God.
19 You Brahmans call him Parabrahm; in Egypt he is Thoth; and Zeus is his name in Greece; Jehovah is his Hebrew name; but everywhere he is the causeless Cause, the rootless Root from which all things have grown.
20 When men become afraid of God, and take him for a foe, they dress up other men in fancy garbs and call them priests,
21 And charge them to restrain the wrath of God by prayers; and when they fail to win his favor by their prayers, to buy him off with sacrifice of animal, or bird,
22 When man sees God as one with him, as Father-God, he needs no middle man, no priest to intercede;
23 He goes straight up to him and says, My Father-God! and then he lays his hand in God’s own hand, and all is well.
24 And this is God. You are, each one, a priest, just for yourself; and sacrifice of blood God does not want.
25 Just give your life in sacrificial service to the all of life, and God is pleased.
26 When Jesus had thus said he stood aside; the people were amazed, but strove among themselves.
27 Some said, He is inspired by Holy Brahm; and others said, He is insane; and others said, He is obsessed; he speaks as devils speak.
28 But Jesus tarried not. Among the guests was one, a tiller of the soil, a generous soul, a seeker after truth, who loved the words that Jesus spoke; and Jesus went with him, and in his home abode.